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The Eunuchs of China

As
long ago as the 8th Century B.C., Chinese emperors kept castrated males
as palace servants, especially to guard harems. This bit of history
is detailed in Mary M. Anderson's Hidden Power: The Palace Eunuchs
of Imperial China, Prometheus Press, 1990. A
substantial excerpt of this text may be found here. This tradition
officially ended with the end of the Ch'ing dynasty in the republican
revolution of 1912. There were said to be 470 eunuchs in China at that
time.

By 1960, the number of Chinese eunuchs had dwindled to 26 living in
Beijing. In that year, a team of urologists was allowed to examine the
last surviving Chinese eunuchs. That study was published in the medical
literature ("The Prostate in Eunuchs" Wu Chieh Ping and Gu Fang-Liu,
EORTC Genitourinary Group Monograph 10, Wiley-Liss, Inc., 1991). The
urologists found that in more than 80% of these men, who had an average
age of 72 and who had been eunuchs for an average of 54 years, the prostate
was nonpalpable. A summary
of that study is reproduced here.

Chinese eunuchs were not only castrated, they
were fully emasculated. (Source: See
above graphic.)

The authors conclude, "This is probably the largest series of human
beings followed for such a long period of time to confirm that testicular
hormone is essential for the development and preservation of the prostate."